Informal Sector

The theme for the Conclave this year is “Water Use Efficiency: An Imperative for India” to highlight the imperative of water use efficiency in the industry, agriculture and urban contexts. 

Solawata, a small village in Jaipur district is barely 10 kilometers away from Sambhar, India's largest saline lake which is a major centre of salt production that produces about two lakh tonnes of salt a year. On our way to the village from Sambhar, we see caravans packed with bright coloured camel saddles parked on the road.

Take a walk through the maze of lanes at Seelampur in north-east Delhi, you could see small children rummaging through electronic waste that has made its way here from all over north India. They segregate end-of-life electrical and electronic products, prise them apart, put them through acid wash and also burn circuit boards in the hope of extracting precious metals.

The informal water market plays a crucial role in meeting the drinking and domestic water security of peri-urban communities. The increasing reliance on private informal water vendors in all our study villages speaks of their significance.

In the first hour of our field work in Malkaram--another village in peri-urban Hyderabad--for the project Ensuring Water Security in Metropolitan Hyderabad, one thing became very evident.

Kakkoos, a compelling documentary film on manual scavenging in Tamil Nadu is all about showing the practice as it is without any filter.

India's urbanisation continues unabated but most of its 53-million plus cities offer an appallingly low quality of life.

A woman stands with a begging bowl and a placard strung around her neck. An old man shuffles along barefoot in the street at Jantar Mantar, the official site of a farmers’ protest in the heart of New Delhi. He finds his way through a group of farmers gathered at the protest site on a hot summer afternoon.

Sneh Bhati, a 52-year-old farmer from Madanpur Khadar in Delhi’s fringes finds the change in the landscape of her 100-year-old village in the last two decades remarkable. Yet it has not taken away the rural charm.

The key issue in the Manipur Assembly election is the ongoing economic blockade in the state, which, in turn, is attributed to the present government’s decision to